oihfedfhorigiojisdeffandomcom-20200214-history
M,utkmu
Methodological and normative individualists tend to reject the notion of metaphysical guilt on two related grounds. The first is that it severs the link between responsibility and control, especially in cases where the group membership being invoked is one that individuals cannot possibly choose, e.g., membership in racial, ethnic or national communities (For a very interesting assessment of this claim, see: Radzik 2001). The second is that the metaphysical notion of guilt violates the liberal ethic of what Rawls calls the “separateness of persons”. According to Rawls, in ascribing responsibility we have to consider persons separately and focus on their own actions so as not to violate principles of justice, principles of justice that for Rawls themselves begin with the value of discrete individuals (Rawls 1971). While not all liberal individualists agree with Rawls' particular claims here, they do agree with Rawls that, at the very least, individual group members have to be faulty in some way in order to be held collectively responsible for harm. Joel Feinberg's theory of group liability is often taken as a starting point of discussion in this context. According to Feinberg, in distributing collective responsibility, we need to focus on two kinds of cases: cases in which all members of a collective share the same fault or cases in which all members of a collective contribute to harm but at different levels. In both kinds of cases, Feinberg stresses, there does not need be a direct link between the individual being held responsible and the harm, but there does need to be the sharing of faultiness. Various faults can exist in the absence of any causal linkage to harm, where that absence is only a lucky accident reflecting no credit on the person who is at fault. Where every member of a group shares the same fault, but only one member's fault leads to any harm, and that not because it was more of a fault than that of others, but only because of independent fortuities, many will be inclined to ascribe collective liability to the whole group (Feinberg 1968, p. 687). Feinberg himself is willing to ascribe collective responsibility to group members for such harm in some cases, although, he makes clear, in doing so we need to shift our attention away from strict liability to a softer kind of social blame on grounds of fairness. He concerns himself with three kinds of cases in particular, namely, those in which large numbers of individuals are independently at fault; those in which the harm is caused by a joint undertaking of numerous persons acting cooperatively, and those in which the harm is ascribed to a particular feature of the common culture which is self-consciously accepted by or participated in by members of the group. Feinberg is willing to accept the possibility of ascribing collective responsibility in all three kinds of cases. But he cautions that we need to proceed on a situation-by-situation basis, since to ascribe collective responsibility in cases such as these requires not only that we locate genuinely shared faults but assess various incommensurable dimensions of individual contributions, including degrees of initiative, importance of assigned task, levels of authority, etc. Gregory Mellema (2006) provides a very useful way of assessing different levels of individual contribution by distinguishing between six different ways in which individuals can be complicit in wrong-doing. According to Mellema, individuals can induce or command others to produce harm. They can counsel others to produce harm. They can give consent to the production of harm by others. They can praise these others when they produce the harm. They can fail to stop them from producing it. A second way of tackling the distribution question in this context that does not seem to violate the principle of individual freedom is to look, not just at the particular role that individuals played in their community's production of harm, but at how much freedom the individuals had to distance themselves from the community that has done wrong. Here we might want to use voluntariness of membership as a criterion of responsibility. Jan Narveson (2002) does so himself in his generally skeptical work on collective responsibility. Narveson argues that in thinking about the responsibility of individuals for group harms we need to be careful to distinguish between four different kinds of groups, namely: those that are fully voluntary; those that are involuntary in entrance but voluntary in exit; those that are voluntary in entrance but involuntary in exit; and those that are voluntary in neither respect. As Narveson makes clear, responsibility is diminished, if not eradicated, as we go down this list. Narveson clearly takes an individualistic perspective here. Hence, he is able to address the questions of individual freedom and personal responsibility with relative ease. Not surprisingly, things get somewhat more complicated when we start to think about individuals, not only as participating in groups, but as taking their identity from groups. Karen Kovach (2006) contends that in some cases, individuals align themselves with their groups—Kovach is concerned with ethnic groups in particular—to the extent that they see the group's agency as an extension of their own. In these cases, Kovach contends, we can distribute collective moral responsibility to all members of the group because of what she calls “moral alignment”. “Moral alignment” cannot of course be a simple matter of identification if it is to sustain collective moral responsibility. For, identification does not implicate an individual in either the intentions or the actions of the group with which she identifies. Hence, Kovach finds it necessary to insist that if individuals are to be held collectively responsible for group harms that they be understood as having “acted out the view of themselves as group members” or as having “performed” the group identity. While such an insistence goes far in showing how collective responsibility might be distributed to all members of a group for harm that the group produced in particular cases, e.g., in cases such as genocide or ethnic cleansing where ethnic identity is everything, it is not clear that the responsibility in question is the kind that we normally associate with moral responsibility. For, while “acting out” or “performing” a group identity may contribute to harm in cases such as these, it is not the same thing as doing something that contributes to that harm. In other words, it does not signal moral agency—unless one asserts one's identity knowing that it will lead to harming others, in which case it is the act of assertion, not identification, that is doing the work here. Interestingly enough, one of the major points of agreement among those now writing about collective responsibility is that responsibility cannot be distributed to those group members who openly resist or fight against their communities' bad actions or policies. See here, for example, the arguments of Joel Feinberg (1968), Peter French (1998), Howard McGary (1986), J. R. Lucas (1993), and Michele Moody-Adams (1994). While the above writers, who find collective responsibility to be a compelling moral construct in general, differ in particular respects, they all agree that it would be wrong to ascribe responsibility to dissenters or, in other words, that if one tries to fight harm one should not be held responsible for it. McGary makes his own claim here in terms of what he calls the “dissociation condition”, according to which a person is exempt from collective responsibility in cases where one's community caused harm if he or she dissociates him or herself from the action of the community by opposing its bad actions or policies (McGary 1986). But there are some who do call for the distribution of collective responsibility to individuals even in cases where these individuals actively opposed their community's wrong do